Polly Faulkner

Member of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

The milk went to Northampton market before the dew was off the meadow, and for most of her working life it went there under the hand of Polly Faulkner. Born in 1757 at Northampton, Massachusetts, she was a dairywoman of the Connecticut River country, a member of the Lancastrian house that kept the Red Ledger, and a descendant of Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who had married at York in January 1486. She never took up the family trade of hunting. What she did was feed, house and cover for those who did, and she did it with the steady discipline of someone who rose at four every morning of her adult life. Her father was Nathaniel Putnam Faulkner, a boatman, born in 1726, who poled and sailed loaded flatboats and gondolas along the great river between the meadow towns and the landings downriver, carrying grain, potash, barrelled pork and sometimes passengers whose business he preferred not to know. Her mother, Eunice Dow, born in 1720, was a herbalist, and her kitchen shelves were hung with bundles of tansy, boneset, yarrow and wormwood, with a stillroom smell that stayed in Polly's clothes all her life. Polly had an elder brother, Joseph Faulkner, born in 1754, who followed the river rather than the herb-garden, and the two were close in the rough manner of siblings who had grown up sharing a loft. The Faulkners of that generation were not a hunting household in the direct sense; they were the kind of Lancastrian family the ledger's slayers relied upon for boats, herbs, silence and a bed. Northampton in the 1760s was a prosperous, godly town in the rich bottomland of the Connecticut. The meeting house stood at the centre of everything, and Sunday was a matter of two long sermons, a cold noon meal, and a great deal of sitting still on hard pews while the wind came up the valley. The Edwards revival had passed into memory but not out of habit, and the town watched itself. Polly learned her letters in a dame school, learned to milk at six and to churn at ten, and by fifteen could judge from the colour of the cream whether a cow had been turned onto the wrong meadow. She had square hands, freckles that never left her, and a laugh that carried across a field. The dairy trade was harder than it looked. A cow needed milking twice a day in every weather, the cheese had to be turned and salted and brined, the butter worked until the last streaks of buttermilk were pressed out, and every barrel or crock had to reach a buyer before it spoiled. Polly took it in her stride, and the family's few acres of hill pasture above the river, which they called the fells in the old Lancashire manner, became her particular ground. She knew every stone wall on them, every soft place after rain, every sheltered hollow where the frost lay latest. That knowledge was to matter, both to her work and, in the end, to the way she died. The war arrived in her twenties. Northampton sent men to the militia musters, then to Saratoga, and the women of the farms kept the fields going. Polly took on the work of two, and sold cheese to the Continental commissaries for a currency that sank week by week, until she learned to ask for grain and salt and cloth instead. Her brother Joseph came and went with the boats, sometimes with word from the Red Ledger's people at Boston and Salem, and the dairy loft occasionally served as a place where a tired hunter could sleep off a night's work without a landlord's questions. In 1780 she married William Hale, a carpenter, born in Haverhill in 1759. He was two years her junior, a quiet, tidy man with a plumb line always in his coat and a preference for well-seasoned pine over green oak, and he had come up the valley to work on a barn frame for a neighbour. They married in the autumn, in the middle of a war that showed no sign of ending, and set up house in a small framed cottage that William built himself, complete with a dairy room on the north side where the sun did not reach. Their first child, Sally Faulkner Hale, was born in 1783, just as the peace was being signed in Paris, and their second, Gideon Hale Faulkner, in 1787, at a time when the new nation was arguing about a constitution and Massachusetts was still uneasy from the winter of Shays' rebellion. The children carried both surnames as the family often arranged it, so that the Faulkner name passed on through Polly to both of them. As a mother she was unsentimental and warm. Sally, who grew up to be a slayer, showed the calling in her thirties, but as a girl she was simply the child who could not be kept out of the hill pasture at dusk, and Polly, who saw more of the world's dangers than she said, took to sending her out to fetch the cows only in daylight. Gideon was the quieter of the two, a boy who liked to sit with his father in the shop and watch shavings curl from the plane. Polly's instructions to both children were plain. If a stranger came to the door after dark and did not come in when asked, they were to fetch her, not to argue, and never to leave the door on the latch. Her connection to the ledger's business was practical and, in its way, courageous. She sold cheese to hunters and gave them credit; she stored their spare gear in the dry space under the dairy floor; and on two occasions, remembered in the family, she sat up through a whole night with a wounded slayer whose wounds she dressed with her mother's salves, and sent him away at dawn with a full stomach and a clean shirt. She did not record any of it. She kept only what the ledger asked of the non-hunting side of the house, the plain note of who had been fed and lodged and when. William Hale died in 1799, of the sweating sickness, at forty, one of the many in the valley struck down that year in a season the old people called by that medieval name, though the physicians used other words. Polly, who had nursed him herself, was left with a farm, two grown children and a carpenter's tools that she could not bring herself to sell. She carried on for six years. In 1805 she went up to the fells on a raw day to bring down a strayed heifer, and on a wet slope she slipped, fell, and did not rise. She was forty-eight. They found her at dusk, and the heifer was standing beside her. In the Slayerverse, Polly Faulkner is remembered as a dairywoman of the Lancastrian side, a woman who fed the hunters and buried her husband and raised a slayer, and who took no tally of her own in the Red Ledger but is counted, in the family's reckoning, among those whose plain labour held the line.